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Projectio

Everything that surrounds us – energy, matter and even the space of time – emerged billions of years ago as a result of the Big Bang. Yet this is only a projection of a huge explosion in which the Universe was born. Modernity is a projection of the past in our minds. The brightest minds of physics revealed this secret of the Universe only 100 years ago, however, the artists were the ones who preserved it throughout history.

One merely has to cast a glance at the works of Youry Bilak, a French photographer of Ukrainian origin, to realize this. The photos are part of the Projectio project at the Second Floor Art Center located at the Administration of the President of Ukraine. Bilak’s camera has captured the Revolution of Dignity (Euromaidan) and the war with Russia as well as contemporary Ukrainian history of the last two years. The photos come to life through images of paintings by the great artists – Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Vincent van Gogh.

The Big Bang, the paintings of the past epochs and the photographs of Ukraine today create a historical axis with the viewer at its center. It is the viewer who finds himself at the canvas once designed by the Grand Creator. The very canvas that artists of different ages try to recreate time and time again.

Photographer

Youry Bilak was born in 1961 in a town of Villeurbanne, France. Raised in a family of postwar migrants who left Soviet Ukraine, he was immersed in the world of Ukrainian folk culture. Bilak’s father, Orest, fought in the Second World War as a member of Ukraine’s kurin in the Bukovyna region. He reached Kyiv and later moved to France where he joined the Resistance Movement.

Youry had been searching for his life’s goal for a long time. He was a racer, a dancer, an actor, and even earned a dental degree. He spent his first hard-earned money on a camera.
In 1983, Youry Bilak visited Ukraine for the first time to study dancing. He experienced a complete culture shock: he arrived in Lviv where people spoke the language of his parents.

The year 1986 became a turning point in Bilak’s career. A renowned theater director, Jerome Savary, came to Lyon, searching for actors for his new music show Cabaret – Bilak auditioned as one of the candidates. He got a role as a dancer, a singer and an actor, leaving for a tour across Europe.

Bilak has spent years travelling all over the world constantly changing his occupations and searching for his place in the world. The arts have been Bilak’s overarching passion through the years. He created The Ukrainians photo exhibition as a result of his journey throughout Ukraine in 2008. The main feature of the exhibition was the adaptation of photos for the visually impaired.

In 2004, Bilak visited the Carpathian Mountains and discovered the spirit captured in Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s novel Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors that was later adapted into a film by filmmaker Sergei Parajanov. Over the next six years, Bilak often returned to the place to take pictures of the local highlanders. The result was Bilak’s 2012 photo collection The Hutsuls: In the Shadows of the Carpathians, one of the nominees at the European Literary Meetings in Cognac, France. In 2013-2014, his photographs were exhibited in Canada.

In the meantime, Ukraine was undergoing radical change. The Revolution of Dignity had prevailed, while the Russian-Ukrainian War was about to break out. In September 2014, Youry Bilak participated in a charity auction organized by the Canada Ukraine Foundation (CUF), selling photos he had taken during the winter protests. The funds were used to purchase medications for Ukrainian hospitals.

During Easter 2015, by a sheer twist of fate, Bilak received a reproduction of Da Vinci’s the The Last Supper (1494-1498) that inspired him to create a new exhibition, Projectio. Youry Bilak plans to use it as a reflection of his personal experiences and invites the viewer to look at the photographer’s own interpretation of history.